1. Field of the Invention
The invention relates to a parking assist apparatus applicable to various vehicles including passenger cars, trucks, and buses.
2. Description of the Related Art
In general, parking a vehicle requires much driving skill of the driver. If the driving skill is not enough, the driver often fails to smoothly park his or her vehicle and thus the operation load on the driver is large. In view of this, for example, Japanese Patent Application Publication No. 2003-40060 (JP-A-2003-40060) describes the following parking assist apparatus. According to this apparatus, when parking the vehicle, the driver temporarily stops the vehicle beside the target parking position. At this time, the parking assist apparatus identifies the target parking position, and then the vehicle is automatically driven obliquely forward from the temporary stop position and then backward, thus assisting the driver's parking operation.
According to this parking assist apparatus, when the driver stops the vehicle beside the target parking position temporarily, the driver stops the vehicle such that a mark provided on the inner side of the passenger-side door and the white line of the frame of the target parking position are alighted with each other as viewed from the driver. In this manner, however, because the mark is planar (two-dimensional) and the eye level of the driver varies depending upon various differences and variations among individual drivers including the size of the body of the driver, the position of the driver's seat, and so on. Therefore, the driver often fails to stop the vehicle beside the target parking position properly, and therefore the accuracy of the parking assist operation by the parking assist apparatus is not high, that is, the parking assist apparatus may fail to assist the driver's parking operation properly.